Night Is the Hunter (5 page)

W
e're a long way from understanding the physiology of the brain,” Dr. Katrina Pose said to Donnally. They were standing in the semicircular driveway of his parents' Hollywood Hills mansion. She had been walking to her car when he drove up. She smiled. “I'm sure you didn't need Janie to tell you that.”

“But with respect to Alzheimer's, she's deferring to you.” Donnally smiled back. “She still considers me to be in the normal range.”

Donnally had first met Dr. Pose five years earlier at her office down the block from the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. It was while his mother was undergoing tests for Parkinson's disease. He had expected the gerontologist to be Hollywood or Beverly Hills in her manner, wearing the intentional, calculated, and disinterested expression of those who were always, or hoped always to be, on camera. Instead, she looked like the tall, awkward, and smartest girl in high school who was now all grown up.

Standing there with her, Donnally felt the irony of his father having chosen her as his mother's doctor, but his now becoming her diagnostic subject.

He also knew that his father would someday view this discussion as a betrayal.

Donnally directed her away from the house and toward the native garden overlooking downtown Los Angeles in the hazy distance.

“It's not just his personal habits,” Pose said, “or his sometimes seeming to live more in the past than the present. There are serious things happening that go beyond just memory impairment or some milder form of dementia, things that indicate Alzheimer's. And the fact that it seems to be developing quickly suggests it might be combined with some other neurological condition. Your mother said that with respect to recent events he gets confused about what happened, when it happened, and in what order. And there's his inability to think of words, common ones, even standard phrases in the industry. Falling silent halfway through thoughts and sentences, and then a burst of anger and withdrawal into himself.”

Pose pointed down the hillside toward a new concrete retaining wall bisecting the shrubbed descent toward the cliff.

“One day I witnessed some of it. I was driving up and I heard him start to yell something to the contractor. Then he stopped midsentence, with his hand in the air, pointing and stammering. Finally, his face flushed and he gave up and went inside.”

“And you're thinking this is physiological, not psychological? A brain issue and not just temporary depression?”

“There are lots of things that can contribute to the kinds of behaviors your father is exhibiting, even beyond the physiological. Worries about aging and loss of vitality. A first true recognition of the inevitability of death. The light of fame that has given meaning to his life fading into an empty darkness. Religious questioning after a lifetime of blind avoidance or acceptance. Sometimes it can begin with guilt, like your father's over your
brother's death. Even things that were only partly in a person's control can cause the mind to suppress or rewrite the past, or distort the present or throw the victim into a vortex of confusion.”

The doctor paused, then said, “In the old Freudian days we'd have called it the return of the repressed.”

Pose was talking about his father, but Donnally was also thinking about Judge McMullin. He was beginning to wonder whether the source of the judge's doubts about the Dominguez case had the same sources as the peculiar behavior and distorted thinking his father had been exhibiting.

“Why did you start with guilt and not depression?” Donnally asked. “Because of his last movie?”

“More because of the way your mother has been framing it. I think they're combined in her mind as one thing or that it was guilt that led to depression.”

Donnally glanced back at his mother's second-story window. He knew she was lying in bed, perhaps terrified by the thought that her advanced Parkinson's had left her helpless to care for her husband during his decline. He felt his heart wrench and his body lean toward the front door, moved by the urge to break off the conversation and go to her. But he fought it off. She needed clarity about his father as much as he did, but was less able to achieve it than he was.

“Are you sure that it isn't wishful thinking on her part?” Donnally asked. “Hoping it's something that can be talked through or medicated away, rather than Alzheimer's, which can't.”

“Well, it's not that it can't be . . .” Pose's voice trailed off.

They both knew drugs could only delay the progression, and then only briefly, but not cure the underlying disease. That was irreversible.

Donnally glanced along the side of the house, past the parking apron and toward the garages in the back. The door to his father's was open and his car was missing.

“You know where he is now?”

Pose looked toward the empty garage and her brow furrowed. “He was supposed to be here this afternoon, and I saw him when I arrived; otherwise I wouldn't have called you to come down. He'd talked about some digital effects he wanted some help with from a company in San Diego, but I didn't think he was leaving town until tomorrow.”

“Why San Diego? L.A. has the best people in the world for doing that kind of thing. Ones he's worked with for years.”

“My guess? Secrecy. That's been one of his preoccupations.”

Donnally felt a rush of anger, as though his father was evading him, even though he couldn't have been aware that Donnally was traveling down to see him.

“Any clue how long he'll be gone?”

Pose shook her head.

“I'm happy for the chance to visit my mother, but if he's already left, I'm not going to accomplish what I came down for. I was hoping to get a sense of him myself and try to figure out a way to get him in for some tests.”

“Can't you stay for few days?”

Donnally shook his head. “I've got to get back up north. I've got someone else's memories to deal with until my father shows up again.”

T
he Paul Ordloff that Donnally found sitting at the bar in the Ocean View Lounge near Monterey along California's central coast matched the black-and-white photo in the San Francisco Bar Association Directory. Just add fifteen years, rosacea from nose to cheeks, skin jaundiced by the bar lights, and shoulders that Donnally guessed had been rounded by the gravity of his clients' crimes.

Donnally slid onto a stool next to him and made a show of glancing around the dark room with its walnut tables and shadowed booths packed with laughing and cackling attendees of the Annual Criminal Defense Death Penalty Conference.

“Where's the ocean view?” Donnally asked him. “Or is the sign out front false advertising?”

Ordloff held his highball glass up toward the neon Anchor Steam sign above the mirror behind the bar. “In here.” Then he cocked his head toward Donnally, squinted at him, and smiled. “I know you.
People versus Bernard Bitsky.
Murder most foul.” He took a sip and smacked his lips. “You were young and I was desperate.”

Ordloff's direct examination of Donnally during a hearing on the defense motion to suppress Bitsky's confession still annoyed
him, but he'd decided on the drive up from Los Angeles to Monterey that he wouldn't bring it up if Ordloff didn't.

But Ordloff did.

“You knew I wasn't lying,” Donnally said. “Your client confessed before I could even read him his rights. Right after I put him in my car for the ride down to the Hall of Justice. That's the truth.”

“Truth?” Ordloff turned toward him in a drunkard's lean and smirked, showing old smoker's teeth, long and yellowed with tar. “What did truth have to do with it? Lives were at stake.”

“Like in the Israel Dominguez case?”

Ordloff pulled back and narrowed his eyebrows at Donnally. “The plot thickens as a new character suddenly enters the play from stage right.” He glanced toward the door. “Sorry, stage left.” Then back at Donnally. “The question is why. Are you with the attorney general's office now and trying to make sure Dominguez gets the needle?”

Donnally shook his head.

“Then gone private and working for his appellate lawyers?”

Donnally shook his head again and reached into his jacket pocket and handed Ordloff a copy of the letter Dominguez had sent Judge McMullin.

Ordloff read it over, holding it up and facing it toward the faint overhead lights, rocking his head side to side as he read it.

“I didn't realize you'd joined the great battle against death.” Ordloff set the letter down, then reached over and shook Donnally's hand. “Welcome to the Monterey Death Festival.” He pointed at the conference binder lying on the bar next to his glass. “I didn't see you listed as an attendee. I would've noticed your name for sure. I always look for familiar ones, especially
ex-cops who've now gotten religion or people who might want to buy me a drink.”

“I haven't and I will.” Donnally glanced around. “I'm not sure why anyone opposed to the death penalty would even be here. Seems to me the best way to oppose it is not to participate. I'm not sure you can have it both ways.”

“That's what lawyering is.” Ordloff grinned. “Having it at least both ways and getting paid for it.”

“I'm not sure that's an answer. As far as I can tell, ninety-nine percent of lawyers and judges won't have anything to do with capital cases.”

Or, like Judge McMullin, would have nothing more to do with them.

Donnally gestured toward the tables behind them filled with attendees, their drinks, and their monogrammed conference binders.

“These people are the one percent that's left. They stop and the machine stops. I would've thought they'd have figured that out by now. You said it. Lives are at stake. If they don't want lives taken, they shouldn't be taking part in taking them.”

Ordloff scrunched up an eye toward Donnally. “Do you always say everything that's on your mind?”

Donnally shrugged. “Not always.” Then he caught the attention of the bartender, pointed at Ordloff's empty glass, and held up two fingers. The bartender nodded and reached behind him toward the scotch bottles lined up together in front of the mirror.

“But at least you end up asking every question that's on your mind.”

Now it was Donnally's turn to smile. “I usually get around to them all.”

The bartender poured and set their drinks down in front of them. Donnally slid a twenty to him. Given that the bar was located on the exclusive bay side of the city, he didn't expect to receive much in change.

Ordloff took a sip from his and said, “And your first question concerns why I put on the defense I did in the Dominguez case.”

Donnally nodded. “In the letter he claims he's innocent and that he told you so from the moment you first interviewed him in the jail after Judge McMullin appointed you to represent him.”

Ordloff leaned back and spread his hands as though speaking for all the attorneys around him in what he was about to say.

“Defendants all claim they're innocent.”

Donnally knew that wasn't true. It was just the opposite. He'd gotten dozens of murder confessions when he was a detective. But he didn't challenge Ordloff. He suspected the man needed his fictions to shield his mind from the thoughts and images that probably attacked him after the alcohol wore off—like Israel Dominguez heading toward his execution.

“And Dominguez wasn't an exception,” Ordloff said, “and no more believable than any other defendant facing two eyewitnesses who knew him so well that they knew which was his favorite jacket and the last girl he had sex with.” He thumped the table with his forefinger. “They couldn't have been mistaken.”

“Why not let him roll the dice? It was his life that was at—”

Ordloff interrupted him with a cutting motion and his words came in a rush. “It was my life too. Not just his.” He caught himself and his face flushed. “Forget I said that. It came out wrong.”

In Donnally's mind, it had come out exactly the way Ordloff was thinking it, maybe even the way he had been thinking it since the day he took on the case.

Donnally wondered how much scotch over the years had gone into filling a psychological moat to protect the man from too much of his own truth.

Apparently, not quite enough, for Donnally now had confirmation that at least part of Judge McMullin's theory and memory about what had happened was correct.

Donnally imagined McMullin's bailiff listening to Ordloff and Dominguez yelling at each other in the attorney interview room, the two talking past each other, Ordloff making arguments to the kid that masked his real fear and the kid crying in frustration and terror.

“Your life?” Donnally said. “You mean your professional reputation. Sounds to me like you didn't want to lose a death penalty trial and carry the loss on your record for the rest of your career, so you dummied up the kind of defense that might allow a jury to find its way to a noncapital conviction. And to do it, you had to disregard Dominguez's claim of innocence.”

Ordloff's didn't respond. He just stared down at his scotch.

“It had nothing to do with my reputation,” Ordloff finally said. “No one was paying attention. No one cared either about a dead Mexican gangster or the live Mexican gangster who murdered him, except the D.A. for whom a conviction in the Dominguez case was no more than a step toward promotion. You weren't going anywhere in the D.A.'s office back then unless you proved yourself by putting some crook on death row. Same thing for judges. They had to prove, in their far-too-revealing words, they could pull the trigger.”

Donnally felt a reverberation from McMullin's riverside confession, the same phrase, the same fear of being seen as weak.

“Then if it wasn't your reputation, what was it?”

Ordloff looked over at Donnally. “You want to know the truth?”

They both recognized it was a rhetorical question, so Ordloff didn't wait for Donnally to answer.

“It was as simple as this. I wasn't prepared to spend my life living with the knowledge that Israel Dominguez was on death row waiting to be executed.”

Donnally hadn't expected that much honesty from Ordloff, a lawyer who was more than willing to falsely accuse cops of perjury, and he wondered whether Ordloff was as divided a human being as McMullin, a tough court-self and a fragile private-self.

Donnally pointed his thumb over his shoulder. “I assumed everyone here was prepared to live with a client on death row, otherwise they wouldn't be at this conference. That's what I meant by participating in capital punishment. If you aren't willing to accept the result, you shouldn't play the game.”

There had been a parallel in his own decision to become a police officer.

“It's no different than a cop deciding to strap on a gun. It's immoral to do it unless you're willing to take a life and live with it afterwards.”

Ordloff shook his head and offered a half smile. “Very dramatic, but I think you're too much of a meat and potatoes guy—black-and-white-with-no-gray-in-between—to grasp the subtlety of what goes on here. The only way most of us can participate is because we lie to ourselves and each other about why we really do these cases.”

Ordloff glanced behind him. “Sure, there are a couple of true believers out there, but everybody else is in it for the money.” His forefinger thumped the bar. “Money—money—money. Whenever
a D.A. charges a defendant with special circumstances, all of the capital defense lawyers hear a cash register ringing, if not for them, for somebody else.”

“Then what do they come down here for?”

“See what's new in the law.”

“They could do that on their computers. All the new cases are online.”

“And people who go to church could just as well stay home and read the Bible all on their own, but they need the romance and the afterglow, or maybe the magic and mystery.” Ordloff grinned. “Like transubstantiation.” His grin soured. “And just like in religion, they spend a lot of time trying to explain away the anomalies, like when the good suffer evil or the evil lack nothing in the way of goods.”

Ordloff tilted his head to his right.

“Look behind you, toward the far corner.”

Donnally glanced over. He spotted four men sitting at a booth, a dim light shining down from above. Like Ordloff, they all had conference binders lying on the table in front of them.

“You see the guy in the gray rumpled sweats? A complete idiot. He couldn't tell you the difference between express and implied malice and he submits motions to the court covered with coffee splatters and jelly stains. And he got life verdicts in eight straight trials in a row. Eight. A world record. You can look it up.”

Ordloff tilted his head again.

“The guy across from him? Skinny, with the specs. Yale undergrad. Harvard Law. Teaches evidence and criminal procedure part time at Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley. The smartest guy in the room—hell, the smartest guy in any room, any time. He did two capital trials and got two death sentences. And they were two
of the weakest death cases that ever came through a California court.”

Ordloff laughed.

“Harvard Law is the exception. The truth is that most of the lawyers who do capital cases aren't the best of the best, they're the best of the worst.”

He swept his arm like a king gesturing toward his court.

“The reason we do death penalty cases—and all on the public dime—is because we weren't good enough to make the cut. Never made it to the big time and the big money cases. And we compensate for that failure by creating a mythology.” Ordloff tapped his chest. “The myth of our great worth to humanity. That's one of the things we come down here to celebrate. Our great worth.”

The words reminded Donnally of a discomfort he felt when he saw around the court building what Ordloff was calling the best of the worst. They handled the more exceptional cases that came through, but they, themselves, were so average, so unexceptional, mere day laborers in what was claimed to be the house of justice.

Their presence had always made the criminal justice process seem disjointed and irrational to Donnally. It sometimes left him with a feeling of having a kind of guilty knowledge—the same sort he was feeling now—like a quarterback who'd just watched the refs make a bad holding call against the other team and who didn't have the moral courage to refuse the penalty.

Maybe that was part of the reason he was happy in Mount Shasta. It didn't have its own courthouse, not even to handle traffic tickets, much less capital cases. Nothing to trigger his imagination, putting him back in courtroom hallways, and giving him the queasy feeling that went along with it.

“In the end, of course,” Ordloff said, “competence has no bearing
on either the verdict or the penalty. In capital cases the outcome is completely arbitrary. Com . . . pletely. It isn't related to the seriousness of the crime or the strength of the evidence or the worth of the defendant. The consequence, again like a religion, is that a mythology has been built up around it.”

The alcohol that Donnally thought had been used to build a moat now seemed like a flood that had burst a dam.

“Then why'd you get into it? I've seen you in action. You're not an idiot. Back then you were better than almost all the other lawyers who did these cases.”

“I learned the lesson too late.”

“Then why stay in it?”

“Because . . .”

Ordloff's voice trailed away as though he was contemplating the question, or had arrived at the heart of the matter and had to admit a truth to himself for the first time.

“I guess you could say it's the continuing punishment for having committed the original crime.”